1 Beyond Good and Evil
name for an actor). And the latter is really the malignant
reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he was annoyed by
the grandiose manner, the mise en scene style of which Pla-
to and his scholars were masters—of which Epicurus was
not a master! He, the old school-teacher of Samos, who sat
concealed in his little garden at Athens, and wrote three
hundred books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of
Plato, who knows! Greece took a hundred years to find out
who the garden-god Epicurus really was. Did she ever find
out?
- There is a point in every philosophy at which the ‘convic-
tion’ of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in
the words of an ancient mystery:
Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.- You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? Oh, you noble
Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being
like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indif-
ferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or
justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine
to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD
you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is
not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Na-
ture? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being
limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that
your imperative, ‘living according to Nature,’ means actu-